Caught!

Published: October 30, 1994

"This was not a case of cheap labor," Arianna Huffington told reporters. "This is a case of a family falling in love with another human being . . ." Ms. Huffington is, of course, the wife of California's Republican Senate candidate, Michael Huffington, who has made getting tough with illegal aliens his battle cry. The human being referred to is the family's former nanny -- herself an illegal alien.

Seldom do politics offer up such sweet moments. The unmasking of monumental hypocrisy is always a wonderful present to the public, and Mr. Huffington's exposure for employing an illegal alien while making his name as an alien-alarmist deserves some kind of award in the annals of campaign duplicity.

Proposition 187, the divisive ballot initiative designed to deprive illegal immigrants in California of services and make enforcers out of health workers and school officials, has been central to Mr. Huffington's campaign. It is a dangerous piece of demagoguery, probably unconstitutional. Voters can now see that the cruel ideas behind his rhetoric flitted so lightly through Mr. Huffington's brain that he could not apply them to his own household.

This has been a year of political campaigns devoid of real content, driven by tactics rather than any sense of elevating conviction. In the current crop of empty candidacies, Mr. Huffington's has been the emptiest of the lot, grasping at the immigration issue to fill a yawning void in thought.

California's voters have reason to relegate both Mr. Huffington and Proposition 187 to the obscurity they so richly -- and in Mr. Huffington's case, hilariously -- deserve.